Vince Cable must be bolder to untangle red tape

What a difference ten months makes. When they arrived in government, Liberals and Tories, not least David Cameron, were united in their enthusiasm for a whole raft of new flexible working rights and utterly unconcerned about the effect on business in the UK.

With similar naivete, the Tories endorsed Harriet Harman’s Equality Act, which is creating huge headaches for British firms competing with China and India.

Ten months in the Whitehall trenches, struggling to reinvigorate our faltering economy, and ministers have begun to accept they might have been wrong.

Commendable start: Business Secretary Vince Cable will have to stay sharp if he wants to cut through even more red tape

Today we report that Vince Cable will delay the extension of the right to request flexible working to parents of children over 16, ban for three years any new regulations on companies with fewer than ten workers and review the plan to introduce flexible working for all.

It’s a commendable start, but not nearly enough. If flexible working is so damaging and expensive, why not scrap the rules altogether and let firms and employees come to their own arrangements?

If, as many experts now argue, the explosion of maternity rights has made companies shy away from giving jobs to women, why not dismantle them too?

If the tribunal system has too often become an opportunity for employees to blackmail employers, why not scrap the system, or at least cap the infinite payouts for sex or race discrimination?

And that’s only the beginning. Now ministers have discovered for themselves the avalanche of regulations pouring out of the EU every week.

That’s why Mr Cable conceded he can’t do anything about half the red tape on British firms. So isn’t it time we reconsidered our relationship with Brussels?

His announcement was a welcome admission the explosion of rights-related red tape is strangling growth.

But words are easy. Action, with the Civil Service determined to subvert ministers at every opportunity, is another matter altogether.

Where greed rules

Had taxpayers not stepped in to save it, RBS would have been destroyed by the reckless greed of some of its employees. The state now owns 83 per cent of this former banking powerhouse.

You might imagine that our shareholding would give us some say over its behaviour, and that its workers would be grateful that we saved their jobs.

Wrong. Yesterday it emerged that despite the bank losing well over £1billion last year, over 100 employees earned £1million. RBS is a big bank, and other firms pay just as much if not more, but this is still a sickening figure.

Every family that has tightened its belt — and every worker who lost their job in the recession — would be justified in asking why their money is now lining the pockets of people seemingly impervious to morality or common sense.

But perhaps what is most worrying is that all this underlines just how little the City has changed. Greed is still good in the Square Mile, and it will destroy us all unless we learn to control it.

Sorting out squatters

FOR years, there has been a huge hole in Britain’s criminal law. Squatting — moving into someone else’s property — is not a criminal offence. This makes it far too easy for squatters to jump between properties, wrecking them and causing huge misery in the process.

Landlords find it difficult and expensive to evict them and the police are powerless to intervene.

Now Ken Clarke wants to make squatting a criminal offence. It’s a hugely welcome change that’s long overdue and Mr Clarke deserves full praise.